The latest AAP NYC blog post is by Professor Meredith Mowder, who recounts the class’ voyage to Times Square to experience sound artist Max Neuhaus’ piece Times Square (1977-1992; 2002-present) and to the New York Public Library to meet with Andrew W. Mellon Director of Research Libraries, William Kelly, and visit the Treasures exhibition.
It was a day of opposites. As I usually do, I sent my B.F.A. students a map with a star on it, marking our meeting spot: 10 AM, the subway grates on Broadway, between 45th and 46th streets. It may have seemed like quite an arbitrary, yet intentional, place to convene. I like creating an aura of mystique, as if we are secret agents called together for a mission. In fact, the assignment for the morning was to experience a long-term public sound artwork by the artist Max Neuhaus, titled Times Square. Our operation, however, was thwarted; the piece was closed for maintenance. As with the artwork itself, there was no sign to communicate its defunct status. It was, simply, quiet.
It was the opposite of what I expected our morning to be. I thought we would approach the subway grates and be surprised to hear a deep, undulating drone. Instead, all we could hear was traffic (and our clattering teeth—it was frigid). Yes, I should have checked the website first, but, for as long as I have known about it (except for a very obvious construction site between 2015-16) it has been on. The piece is known to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Times Square was first installed in 1977 after four long years of negotiations with the MTA, Con Edison, and the city. Once approved, Neuhaus lifted the metal subway ventilation grates on the small pedestrian triangle between 45th and 46th streets and climbed down into the dark underground chamber. There, he installed his homemade electronic sound generator that continuously pumped out an atonal drone. Above ground, the sound ebbed and flowed, swelled and dissipated, like the subway system itself was moaning and groaning. The sounds generated below resonate with the frequencies of the underground room, bouncing off its concrete walls and mixing with the shifting air as the subways push through the connected tunnels nearby.
I wanted us all to stand above the grates and experience the sound—what I like to call a “primordial drone”—at the center of one of the busiest places on earth. I wished we could have experienced the sound enveloping us, like a cocoon, protecting us from the chaos and sensory overload of Times Square. As we looked around at the flittering billboards, we discussed the various phases of Times Square, from the seedy, porn-centric Times Square of the 1970s, when Neuhaus originally installed his piece, to its attempted sanitization throughout the 1980s and 1990s, to the full-fledged capitalist extravaganza it is today. What would it have been like to experience this womb-like drone while sex workers and cruisers roamed above? Would it have felt like the underbelly of the city was bubbling up? What about the current summertime street buskers, like Elmo and the Naked Cowboy, performing overhead? We were all left to wonder; the class was left to take my word on it.
Indeed, Neuhaus’ Times Square largely relies on word-of-mouth. No plaque or public signage is altering one to its existence. There is no wall-text or artist statement nearby to explain the sound. Most people have no idea there is any artwork there at all. Most people don’t even notice the sound, or, just think it’s one of the many muffled mechanical sounds that form the sonic texture of New York City. Moreover, because the piece is immaterial (sound) and ephemeral, it is impossible to capture in photography, often resulting in an uninspiring shot of subway grates. Video, although better, is a suboptimal surrogate. It needs to be experienced. But, like so many well-known riddles (ie, a tree falling in a forest, the chicken and the egg), can a public artwork have a public audience if the public audience doesn’t know it is a public audience of a public artwork?
This particular class meeting, beginning with Max Neuhaus’ Times Square, was organized around the question of “the public.” In preparation, we read Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics.” In his text, Warner outlines what he understands to be the conditions of a public. One kind of public can be an audience, or a crowd, sharing the experience of an event or a physical space. One of the further requirements for a public is attention. Specifically, people need to be aware of their membership within the public. The quality of this attention is not as important as mere “active uptake,” or acknowledgment. To be aware is to be part of the public; those who are not aware are not part of the public. There is much discussion about public artworks being more democratic and accessible by virtue of their placement in “public space,” (ie, not guarded by institutions such as museums or galleries), but how accessible is an artwork that is invisible (literally) to the public?
On our way to the second stop of the morning, the New York Public Library, I was bombarded by a particularly bright billboard advertisement that seemed to shout: “FIND PEACE AND PURPOSE EVERY DAY.” The opposite could not have been made more apparent: we were in one of the most overly stimulating places on the planet and our immediate purpose—visiting the Neuhaus piece—was dashed. Ironically, the billboard was an ad for the “Calm” app, which apparently provides meditations and daily affirmations for those in pursuit of happiness, health, and … calm; from a sales standpoint, its placement could not have been more spot-on.
Walking up the grand staircase of the Beaux-Arts style NYPL main branch, the Stephen A. Schwartzman building, we were elevated, literally and figuratively. This great ascent was designed on purpose: at the time the main branch was built, in 1911, on the site of the former Croton Reservoir, the United States was competing on the world’s stage. The architectural firm Carrère and Hastings was hired to design and construct the massive marble building with flourishes that deliberately conjure the great temples, palaces, and fountains of Europe. The story of the library’s founding and design is not only one of forging an inimitable American identity, but is also a perfect example of how tricky the term “public” truly is.
The real highlight of the day was our meeting with Dr. William Kelly, the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries. With a warm and gregarious welcome, he invited us past the heavy “Staff Only” door and into his elegant wood-paneled and book-lined office.
There, we talked about the origins of the New York Public Library and its complicated foundation, built on city-owned “public” land but financed privately by the titans of industry, philanthropy, and politics—John Jacob Astor, James Lenox, Samuel J. Tilden, and Andrew Carnegie. The New York Public Library emblematizes the intertwining of what is perceived as public and what is perceived as private.
We went downstairs to the library’s new permanent (but rotating) exhibition, Treasures, which is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting shows I have ever seen. Where else can you view Thomas Jefferson’s fair copy of the which is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting shows I have ever seen. Where else can you view Thomas Jefferson’s fair copy of the Declaration of Independence (1776) in the same proximity as the Gutenberg Bible (1455), an original page from Jacob Riis’ handwritten manuscript of How the Other Half Lives (1890), Romare Bearden’s Black Manhattan (1969), Mick Rock’s mock-up for Lou Reed’s Transformer and so, so much more. Perhaps my favorite treasure of the day was choreographer Jerome Robbins’ Diary, Volume 5 (1973) an accordion-folded visual mélange of watercolor, newspaper clippings, travel stubs, notes, sketches, and theater tickets. Although it wasn’t a written diary page, it was just as impactful and evocative, if not more, of his thoughts and experiences. Beyond the exhibition, we admittedly had private access to what is behind the library’s closed doors. We went into the now-defunct seven-story tall stacks at the heart of the building (closed due to poor ventilation and climate control for delicate paper materials), and had views of the main reading room from the balconies above.
The history of the NYPL and our exclusive experience of it that day is characteristic of the many complications in analyzing the perceived antipodes of “public” and “private”. So while it may have initially felt like a day of opposites—Times Square as the loud, unabashed capital of capitalism, and the NYPL, as a quiet pillar of public knowledge—what we realized is there is much more overlap between and nuance to these worlds.
1. Michael Marner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 1, Vol. 14 (Winter 2002): 49 – 90.